Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of content access management, and more particularly to the field of controlling access between user devices in an online communication environment.
Discussion of the State of the Art
Current social networking environments allow a user to sign up and engage with family, friends, and mutually accepted individuals, often those with common interests or connections. The social network ecosystem may range from networks with broad scale social media functionality to specific networks focused on chat, dating, or interest-matching. Common forms of user engagement between connections within a social network include the ability to post and share text, photo, or video; the ability to construct a profile and view other profiles; engagement functionality such as the ability to like, favorite, or comment; notifications, alerts and privacy systems to manage user activity; and the ability to search, discover, or like match with individuals of interest.
Generating long-term sustainable engagement among individuals within a social network environment has remained a fundamental problem resulting in the value destruction of many social networks. The inherent value created by a social network is ultimately the result of its users engaging in quality content exchange and is sustained by the discovery of new connections and new, desirable content; as user engagement decreases, so too does this network effect and value decrease. Even amongst well-known friends within a social network, concept and user fatigue leads to a persistent and exponential decrease in user engagement over time.
Current forms of engagement among both accepted friends and unknown individuals looking to interact within the social network ecosystem are often impersonal, unsatisfactory, suffer from diminishing returns, and may be focused on validation or ego fulfillment. For example, within a broad-scale social network, a user may be overloaded with irrelevant or unwanted content and receive diminishing returns on ego-validation from additional engagement. Within a chat-focused social network, users may only engage with a core group of known friends with no incentive to interact with others. And within a dating-focused social network, users suffer from superficial matching of prospects, sex imbalance issues, and persistent rejection leading to unwanted behavior such as spam and unwanted mass messaging.
Although the defined goal of many users within a social media environment is to discover new individuals of interest, current forms of social media usually allow for engagement only among a limited set of accepted friends. Generating lasting engagement between two unconnected individuals remains a core issue. Social networks are also becoming increasingly segregated based on friend, demographic, and interest groups. Within this ecosystem, segregation outcomes are often the de-facto choice as the various roles in an individual's daily existence become lumped together into one place for family, friends, peers, colleagues all sharing one set of information. Engagement beyond this increasingly segregated environment can often be futile, leading users to seek multiple social networks each for a specific purpose, segment content for specific friend networks, or to focus on results-driven engagement.
There remains a fundamental need for a method to stimulate and reward meaningful user engagement across the entire social network ecosystem over the long term. Engagement levels within the ecosystem are negatively impacted by user and concept novelty fatigue and maintaining organic and sustainable daily engagement levels remains highly challenging. Better methods for determining acceptable connections and maintaining engagement levels are needed for both existing friends and unknown individuals or entities of interest, and for establishing affirmative and lasting connections on specific social networks such as those results-driven on networking, interest-matching and dating.
Furthermore, activity within social networks are increasingly prioritized by paid advertising and commercial interests. Users accept this form of advertising as an annoyance as the vast majority of these social networks are provided at no financial cost to the user but does ask the user to commit their time for content population and engagement within the social network. User engagement is effectively purchased by commercial interests, further contributing to user fatigue and decreased engagement levels as relevant, wanted content must compete with prioritized and undesirable commercial content.
Furthermore, as memberships within social network become more global and span the globe, a thematic based communication mechanism would provide a common easily understandable graphic communication medium providing a useful, consistent representation of organic value across different languages, that may surpass cultural and communication barriers with universally recognizable schemas. Additionally, by providing a user with a reward-based and incentive-aligned methodology to select between wanted and unwanted content over the intrusion of forced commercial content, it would allow social networks to establish and maintain a business model while also encouraging organic and sustainable user engagement over the longer term.